Did you ever read any Ellery Queen? I’m thinking of the early novels such as The Roman Hat Mystery. I’d get one from the library on Friday afternoon after school, then having done my homework I’d read as far as the point where the challenge to the reader was issued: ‘You now have all the clues. Can you solve the mystery?’ Then the next morning, after finishing the rest of my homework, I’d decide on my solution and then read the final chapter to see if I’d got it right.
Ellery always figured out the answer, of course, and pretty often I did too; the fun of the game was standing or falling by my own reasoning. But those classic puzzle whodunits are a very artificial genre. Life isn’t like that, any more than most problems in dynamics can be solved as neatly as the applied maths questions I was doing for homework at the time.
I continued reading crime novels into my teens, but not the Cluedo variety. I was more interested in the why than the who. Ellery Queen’s later novels were more like that. On TV we had Columbo, shabby raincoated embodiment of the criminals’ guilt, who hounded them like Nemesis until he prodded them into making a fatal mistake. In comparison, puzzle whodunits concocted for the little grey cells felt as outmoded as cloche hats and the Charleston. And that branch of the crime fiction family tree survives up to the present day, as author Anthony McGowan points out:
It’s curious, then, that investigative role-playing scenarios often feel like they’re stuck in that primordial era of crime stories when a paper trail of clues would lead an infallible detective to the culprit. The unexamined goal of the scenario often seems to be to cast the player-characters in the role of Sherlock Holmes (how often in a fantasy context are we expected to match the feats of a Conan or Elric? more often we're the luckless foot soldiers who hope never to meet them) and the job then is to make sure they don’t miss the clues they’ll need to reach the correct conclusion.
Justin Alexander addresses that with his three-clue rule. In brief, it supplies the players with three different ways to figure out the next set-piece in the storyline. Certainly I think that if you’re going to have clues, you shouldn’t usually be getting the players to roll Spot Hidden or Search rolls to find them, because there are few ways in which simply not finding a clue leads to more interesting outcomes than finding a clue and drawing the wrong conclusion.
But as Robin Laws points out here, ‘The trail of clues, or bread crumb plot, is not the story, and does not constitute a pre-scripted experience. What the PCs choose to do, and how they interact with each other as they solve the mystery, is the story.’
Indeed, it’s also the story if they signally fail to solve the mystery. In “Murder Your Darlings” my players got totally the wrong end of the stick. And so what if they did? Sometimes the dog meows in the night-time. Unsolved crimes are just as interesting as the ones that get neatly wrapped up. Miscarriages of justice are more dramatic than tidy endings.
That said, I’d recommend anyone planning on running (or just playing in) an investigative scenario to try Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. You’re chasing around Victorian London, maybe seeing the whole of the picture, maybe seeing a part of the whole, or possibly cooking up a theory that’s entirely different from the truth. Crazy explanations are also fun, and at the end the Great Detective ties it all up with a bow for you. That’s a boardgame, and I wouldn’t enjoy any roleplaying session that felt so constrained, but it's a useful experience for thinking about mystery scenarios.
Or if you’re more into the thankless, foot-slogging reality of policework, why not try "Keeping the Peace", a mini-campaign I wrote a couple of decades back? It’s designed for Tekumel, but with a little tweaking you could fit it to any urban game setting.
Dominic Cummings, the Svengali of British government, said on his blog recently that he's looking for "super-talented weirdos":
"We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB. [...] By definition I don’t really know what I’m looking for but I want people around Number 10 to be on the lookout for such people."
I think I know what he means and blimey, Dom, I can do that. Read a pop science book and draw specious conclusions about entirely unrelated subjects? Child's play. For instance, while pondering the question of exit routes from the coronavirus lockdown, I came up with a humdinger. See what you think...
Obviously a vaccine would be nice. An all-purpose antiviral (such as the Gates Foundation has been funding research into) would be even better, as it would insure against the next (possibly deadlier) virus. But what we really want is a once-and-for-all solution that will stop all viruses dead.
It’s possible to create synthetic nucleotides. Instead of A, C, T, G call them Z, Y, X and W. So far research has concentrated on getting synthetic nucleotides to code for new amino acids so we can build new proteins that don’t normally occur in nature. But how about we instead get them to code for exactly the same amino acids as the existing 64 ACTG-based codons?
Then it becomes possible to rebuild the entire human genome using ZYXW-based codons. There’s a one-to-one correspondence; they build exactly the same amino acids; you still get a human being – but the difference is that the genome of this ZYXW human makes no sense to any existing virus. If a virus enters the cell of a ZYXW human, any instructions it gives the cell to replicate itself will be meaningless. Viruses would literally be speaking an unintelligible language as far as humans are concerned.
You might think we’d have to replicate the whole human microbiome as well as the H.Sap genome, but those gut bacteria (etc) would all function perfectly well in the ZYXW human, because the phenotype is unchanged. It’s only viruses, which work by subverting the cell’s DNA machinery, that would be stymied.
I should get my application off to Whitehall right away, don't you reckon? With a noggin full of notions like this I'd fit right in with Dom's dream team. But enough wild surmise -- tomorrow we're on firm ratiocinative ground with a look at investigative scenarios.
Here’s a sandbox roleplaying
campaign I ran a few years back. The setting: Baghdad in 800 AD (183-184 in the
Hijri calendar). I often like to start out with just a setting and characters, and the
intrigues that go with them, then I throw out a bunch of threads and see which
the players will grab hold of. The advantage of that approach is they’re
familiarizing themselves with the background at the same time as various
adventure leads are warming up.
The deep background to the campaign postulated a forgotten era when aliens travelled to Earth and enhanced some
humans (the likes of Gilgamesh) to assist them in returning to the stars. Some
of that ancient technology yet remains if the characters know where to look.
There’s no magic in
this setting, but psionics exist (though very rare). Still, you don’t need to
stick to any of the assumptions or storylines here. Just chuck some of these
ideas at your players. All they have to do is react in character and the story
will shape itself.
BAGHDAD LOCATIONS OF INTEREST
The Shammasiyah Quarter. The inhabitants of
these suburbs are Armenian Christians, transplanted en masse by order of
the Caliph from their original village. The centre of the community is the Samalu Monastery. Any Christians among
the PCs can get lodging here if they need it, but the practices of Armenian
Christianity are different from those of the Franks and tensions could soon
develop.
The Mamuni Palace is on the east bank of
the Tigris opposite the Palace of Eternity. This is Jafar’s residence.
The Bab-at-Tak, the high arched gate at the eastern end of the Main Bridge, is renowned as a meeting place for poets.
The Palace of Eternity (Kasr-al-Khuld) was built twenty-five years ago in the reign of Harun al-Rashid's grandfather, the Caliph Mansur. Its majestic gardens are said to rival the beauty of paradise, and it stands high above the Tigris opposite the Khurasan Gate, free from the gnats that swarm in lower-lying areas.
The four Houses of Wisdom stand south of the Gharabah Gate. Each has a professor and seventy-five students, and in the entrance hall to the campus rests a famous water-clock called the Chest of Hours. The libraries of the Houses are arranged and catalogued to make information easy to find, and for a price the students can copy any work that characters require.
For colour the referee may wish to allude to markets and professional quarters such as the Needle-makers Wharf, the Market of the Perfumers, the Date Market, the Cotton Market, and the Tuesday Market. Also canal names such as the Fowls' Canal, the Canal of the Dogs, the Canal of the Cooks, and the Thorn Bridge over the Nahr Isa canal, adjoining the Market of Shawk-Sellers, these thorns being used as kindling for ovens and public steam baths (hammams, a staple of daily life to be found throughout the city).
The Kufah Gate ("Pilgrims' Gate") in the south-west is where those setting out for Mecca leave the city. And no tour of 9th century Baghdad is complete without mentioning the Office of the Poor Tax (Diwan-as-Sadakah) which stands opposite Dromedary House.
PRINCIPAL NPCs
HARUN al-Rashid (37) the Caliph.
JAFAR al-Barmaki (33) the Vizier.
ABBASSA (28) the Caliph’s favourite sister; very smart.
ASMA (32) another of the Caliph’s sisters; schemer but not very effectual;
resentful.
MAMUN (20) the Caliph’s eldest son; good at statecraft, sciences and arts, but
no soldier. Likes astronomy. Mother: Marajil,
a Persian slave. Advisors: Fahl ibn Sahl
and Hasan ibn Sahl
AMIN (17) the Caliph’s second son; good military mind, poor at politics & leadership; a bit strident. Mother:
the Princess Zubaida.
QASIM (15) the Caliph’s third son. Honest, trustworthy – far too much for his
own good. Tutored by Prince Malik
(see below). Mother: Qasif, a
lowborn slave.
MUTASIN (12) the Caliph’s youngest son.
COURTIERS & GENERALS
TAHIR ibn Husayn (30): a Persian general, known as Zol-Yamanein
(“the warrior with two right hands”) as he fights with a sword in each
hand.
ALI ibn Isa ibn Mahan (34) a general of Bedouin ancestry, secretive
and inscrutable, loyal to Prince Amin’s faction.
Prince MALIK ibn Salih (50) a troublesome
character – effective general, member of the Abbasid family, proud, he chafes
and gets impatient when not given a task. Has mentored the Caliph’s third son, Qasid, since he was a child.
KHUZAIMA ibn Khazim (48) grizzled chief of police, cautious, plays
the political spectrum and is careful not to offend any powerful factions.
IN KHORASAN
FADL ibn Sahl and HASAN
ibn Sahl
Brothers (Zoroastrian
converts) who are destined to advise Mamun
as viziers – assuming that the player-characters do nothing to change the
course of history. (As if.)
OTHER BAGHDAD NOTABLES
AHMAD ibn Hanbal (20) an Arab of the Banu Shayban tribe; young
zealous scholar who regards the sect of the Caliph to be heretical, and openly
preaches such, but is too popular simply to throw in prison.
ALI al-Rida (45) an imam and Dean of the House of Wisdom, seventh descendent of the
Prophet, rather unworldly mystical type, mentor of Maruf al-Kharki.
MARUF ibn Firuz (42) “al-Kharki”, a Persian convert from
Christianity, extremely ascetic, a hardliner who looks for heresy and impiety.
He was formerly the slave of Ali al-Rida.
SARIK al-Saqati (33) disciple of Ali al-Rida and
bodyguard to Maruf ibn Firuz. He is a Sufi martial artist and also has a
psionic power to make people forget their family and become detached.
Archdeacon BARADAN (60) of the Samalu Monastery, a shrewd
operator who keeps a low profile.
Vazak, Musheg
and Sahak (all mid-30s):
assistants to the Archdeacon.
OTHER MONARCHS
The Byzantine Empire
is ruled by Irene of Athens (42),
who recently (797 AD) deposed her son Constantine VI and had him blinded and
imprisoned. She pays a tribute to the Caliph to avoid war (the Byzantines
already have their ongoing war with the Bulgars and rivalry with the Franks to
contend with) but it’s known that her finance minister, Nikephoros (45), opposes this.
Charlemagne (58) has recently been crowned Emperor of Rome.
Al-Hakam I (33) rules as Emir of Al-Andalus (Iberia) which is the last surviving
stronghold of the Umayyad dynasty which formerly ruled the entire Muslim world,
until the Abbasid rebellion in which the Umayyad line were hunted and
massacred.
Idris II (16) rules as Caliph of the Berber kingdom of Morocco. His father was
poisoned by an assassin sent by Harun al-Rashid sixteen years ago, so there’s
no love lost there. Still a teenager, Idris is said to be “a person of almost
magical ability”.
Ibrahim I (44) is due to be installed as Emir of Ifriqiya (modern Libya and
Tunisia) to rule there on behalf of the Abbasids, a response to the ongoing
rebellion of the Berbers against their Arab governors.
Krum the Horrible (43) is Khan of the Bulgars. Said to drink
from cups made by lining his enemies’ skulls in silver. The clue is in the
name.
Obadiah (30) is Khan of the Khazars. Like most of his nobles, he is a convert
to Judaism, but most of the Khazars are Tengrists (kind of ancestor-worship
meets animism).
She (Hiya = “she” in her native Arabic) is ruler ofthe lost civilization of Kôr in the heart of Africa. She is an immortal, born 900
years ago in Arabia, but who has gained access to some ancient (and possibly
non-terrestrial) technology and has been busy learning about it.
In Kôr, Hiya has a Chamber of the Far-Travelling
Carpet which has a pattern of tiles on the floor that create a dimensional
“carpet” which allows her to travel across great distances. The effect is like
teleportation, and the portal remains hanging in the air until she returns to
it. Using this, she has been disrupting the Silk Road trade from a hidden
mountain fortress above Samarkand.
She wants the arrow (qv)
from Nubia, and has sent an android assassin and three mortal but devoted
followers to get it. The android is a killing machine with ebon hair and paper
white skin. In ordinary human terms she is mindless, and cannot speak or
interact socially; nor can she be
detected with ESP. (Tekumel fans may recognize the type.)
ADVENTURE SEEDS
These aren’t presented in any particular order, but note that some are
dependent on earlier threads having been picked up.
The Envoy from the West
Charlemagne (known in
Baghdad as “Shah al-Ma'in”) has crowned himself Emperor of Rome, and has sent emissaries
with gifts for the Caliph. If any of the player-characters are to be European
Christians, that’s how they come to be travelling to Baghdad.
Order of Succession
The Caliph is due to
announce this shortly. Not even Jafar knows what he’s planning. Traditionally,
the eldest son, Mamun, has been the heir apparent, but his mother was a slave
whereas the mother of the second son, Amin, is an Abbasid princess.
The ceremony involves
the closing of the four gates of the Round City (see below). The Caliph then
proclaims that Amin will be heir, and the order of succession will thereafter
pass to Mamun, who in the meantime will go to the city of Merv to take up the
governorship of Khorasan (Persia). Tahir of the Two Swords comes to Baghdad to
fetch him.
The Gates
To mark the
announcement of the order of succession, the four gates of the Round City are
all closed at noon prayers. It can be seen that each gate is covered in an
array of cuneiform-style glyphs.
On close examination:
the metal
of which the gates are made is an unknown alloy.
they are
covered with some kind of graphical cipher, perhaps indicating coded charts.
History: the gates
were brought by order of the Caliph’s father from the town of Wasit, which stands on the site of Zandawad, a city built by order of King
Solomon. (Unknown history: they were
brought originally from Uruk.)
Deciphering the glyphs
reveals a kind of stylized map centred on the site of Uruk. It’s clear that
there must be a fifth set of gates somewhere, containing missing information
required to complete the map, and after consulting the records the characters
find that these other gates were sent to the Mosque of Mansur but never fitted. The Imam, Alial-Rida, refers
enquiries to Marufibn Firuz, who of course refuses all
requests to see the gates.
The fifth gates are
being kept at the Bukhariot Mosque
in the Lion & Ram Quarter, west of the Round City. Even having found out
that much, the characters have to somehow get to see them – not easy, as they
are packaged, piled up and far too heavy to lift, and of course the imam of the
mosque, Halba ibn-Jubaya, has been told not to grant access.
The fifth set of
glyphs firmly pinpoints a location at modern-day Warka, which will lead the
characters to the Hairy Man adventure
(see below).
A Hairy Man
The ruins of a huge
city wall are found by workmen digging irrigation channels for the modern town
of Warka. This is part of the ruins of Uruk. This is not widely reported, so
unless the characters have deciphered the map on the gates (qv) they
will never get to hear about it.
If the ruins are excavated,
a tomb is revealed in which lies the perfectly preserved body of a big (7 foot)
hairy man with strong, almost ape-like teeth. This is Enkidu, an immortal, who has remained in a state of suspended
animation for millennia. The characters may be able to revive him, but ensuring
he becomes an ally rather than a rival or enemy is not so easy.
Running Amok
There have been
several violent incidents in the Atikan Quarter. The first few were individuals
running amok, then larger groups. Usually the pattern is attacks on property,
escalating to violence or even murder, and afterwards the perpetrator claims to
have only a vague memory of their actions, as in a dream. All except the first
incident happened on a Friday.
First of the
perpetrators was Hisham of Basra, who is due to be executed in three days. He
didn’t kill anyone, but was heard shouting blasphemous remarks. If questioned,
he may reveal that he had gone to the Jewish Quarter to try to catch a glimpse
of a girl he’d seen.
The actual cause is a teenage
girl, Anonui bat-Ezra, who is developing psionic powers that as yet are not
under her conscious control. She belongs to a wealthy Jewish family (her
father: Ezra bar-Adom) and travels to the bath-house each Friday in a covered
litter. One incident occurred on Friday evening outside a house in the Jewish
Quarter used as a synagogue.
The Road to Samarkand
Reports are starting
to trickle in of disruption on the Silk Road. Caravans have been attacked by
bandits out of the hills, who seem to have become unnaturally bold of late. The merchant Yao ZHANG, who claims to be an
emissary of the Chinese Emperor Dezong, recently arrived with a report of
having been overtaken by a sandstorm crossing the Karakum Desert, and his
companions were whisked away “by bridges that walk” – or, at least, the
translator thinks that’s what he said. This connects to The
Forty adventure.
The Caliph’s New Palace
The Caliph no longer
wishes to reside in the Golden Gate Palace, but instead plans to move out of
the Round City to the (larger) Palace of Eternity on the west bank of the Tigris.
Naturally this raises concerns about security.
The Arrow
A dignitary from Egypt
brings the Caliph an arrow that can cut almost anything. (This is literally
true; it’s like a vibroblade.) He says it was brought by a traveller from
Nubia. The Caliph orders it placed in the palace vaults.
Cursed Ship
Reports from sailors
in the Gulf describe a “high, bronze-hulled” vessel, “like a floating castle”.
Prince Mamun's farewell party
This episode follows Order
of Succession and The Arrow. There is a party for Mamun on the eve
of his departure for Khorasan.
During the party, a guard
staggers up from the vaults where the Caliph's treasures are kept. He collapses
in front of one of the characters, revealing two long deep sword-cuts across
his back.
In the vault there is
a circular pattern of rainbow light on the floor. An albino warrior with a
fixed, insane expression stands ready to fight as three men with jet-black skin
search the racks and boxes. This is the group Hiya (“She”; qv) has sent
to fetch the arrow, and can ultimately connect to an adventure based on H RiderHaggard’s novel.
The Forty
This is the eventual
result if the characters investigate The Road to Samarkand adventure
seed or travel to Persia and end up investgating attacks on the trade routes.
In the hills above
Samarkand, the Forty are a group of heretical rebels from Afghanistan. They
have come across an ancient alien facility with a huge circular door that opens
on a voice command. (One door only partly opens. There’s a smaller postern gate
but they don’t know the command for that.)
FORTY THIEVES
Sword 18 2d+2 cut
Knife 17 2d-1 cut
Javelin 16 2d+2 impale
(with thrower)
HP 15 Parry 13,
Dodge 12, Perception 17, Stealth 15
Armour: Kevlar-like material (7,
weight 20) on torso; mail (4) on limbs, head.
Inside: a tunnel
thirty feet tall with gantries (partly collapsed, but now reinforced with
wooden poles) to a series of apartments. There are lighting globes, about half
of which still work. At the end of the tunnel is a hangar where the Big Spider (a sixty-foot-tall military robot) is housed.
All its attacks can
only be defended against with Dodge.
*If both darts
penetrate armour, delivers electrical stun (3d direct to Fatigue) and reels
victim in. Victim has two rounds to break free: ST vs effective ST of [damage
taken x d6]. Then reaches blades and is wrenched: roll ST or HT vs effective ST
of 30 or take 4d crush to neck or limb.
**Used when victim
reeled in; remember that these are monomolecular and halve armour.
The Big Spider is not
under the control of the Forty, but it recognizes that they control the doors.
When the doors are open, it periodically patrols its route and attacks people
crossing the border without authorization (ie everybody). It collects all their
items, brings them back, but then discards them as nothing matches the items it
is programmed to search for. When “parked”, the spider also projects a local
view (5 mile radius) of the terrain as seen from a satellite.
The Forty therefore
have treasure here worth about 5 million dirhams in the form of gold, gems,
spices, silks, artworks, weapons, etc. This wealth is what enables them to
bribe a network of informers in Samarkand, allowing them to cow the government
there by assassination or bribery.
Samarkand
The city is ruled by a
Council of Three: Arash, Jamsid and Kazem, all of the House of Aramanth. As
it’s Persian, politics is less religiously dominated, though it is not so free
and cosmopolitan as Merv or Nishapur.
The Grand Imam is
Ardeshir al-Yaha, a moderate, originally from Baghdad.
The leading light in high society is
Princess Parisa Esfani, mid-40s, bossy, rich.
The local agent of the
Barmaki clan is Sitvar ibn Ghabani, a young and very serious fellow, more
resourceful than his callow appearance might suggest.
WHAT HAPPENED IN OUR CAMPAIGN
The player-characters realized the
trouble in the marketplace (Running Amok) was caused by a psionic and identified the likely
culprit as Anonui, daughter of Ezra the rug merchant. But they couldn’t get
access to Anonui until her two older sisters were betrothed, whereupon it would
be possible for a third suitor to visit Anonui. So they went to Ezra and three
of them asked to marry his daughters.
Charlemagne’s two
emissaries, Lanterfrid and Sigimund, were due to return home. The Caliph (at
Jafar’s instigation, after a recommendation by the player-characters) appointed
Ezra to take some fine rugs to the new Roman Emperor as a gift. Oh, and a white
elephant called Abulabaz as well. That gave Ezra and incentive to marry his
daughters off, so that they would be taken care of while he was away from
Baghdad.
However, Anonui was by
now learning to control her power, even though largely unaware of it. She caused
Ezra to demand an impossibly huge dowry of 30,000 dirhams for each of her sisters (Buran and
Huldah).
Two of the PCs now decided
that the best way to deal with Anonui bat-Ezra, the nascent psionic in the
Jewish quarter, was not to marry her but to kill her. Yes, I know; I thought it
was a dark turn too. They sneaked off without telling the others, crept into her bedroom at night, and smothered her
with a pillow. When the other PCs confronted them about this, they fell back on the argument that it was better than waiting
till she grew too powerful. (You may recall Nick Fury saying something along those lines. Cap wasn't impressed.)
Hashim was still
executed for blasphemy, as the presiding judge Maruf ibn-Firuz (aka al-Kharki)
would brook no plea for leniency. But it’s not clear whether Hashim’s fate ever
figured in the characters’ calculations anyway. As one of the players put it in
the write-up:
“We killed the carpet
seller's daughter, making it seem that she died in her sleep. We tried to paint
her as a witch to exonerate the young man due to be executed from blasphemy. He
was executed anyway.”
At the ruins of Uruk, their
map guided them to a hill which turned out to cover a huge man-made dome. They were
able to break into this and lower themselves fifty metres to the floor below.
Some falling rocks gave them gashes and bruises, but that was nothing compared
to the sentry spider-robots that attacked using circular blades on their legs.
They entered what some
might have considered a burial chamber, though it was obviously built with a
different purpose in mind. Banks of instruments on the walls were now so
damaged that only an occasional light blinked on and off. Waking up the power
source briefly displayed a holographic star map filling the whole room which
showed a planetary system located close in to the galactic core – not that they
were able to interpret what it meant.
On a catafalque lay
the hairy body of Enkidu. (His hair having continued to grow very slowly over the
centuries he’d been in “Odinsleep”.)
A player said in the
write-up:
“I think we activated
a homing beacon, but it seemed to point straight up into the night sky where
there are no ships. Are there? And we saw something that might have been a star
map, but there just aren’t that many stars in the sky. Are there?”
Thereafter, having
been afflicted by a device called the Eye of Humbaba, they travelled to the heart of Africa to seek help from Hiya. Or did they go to steal her power? It
depends which of the players you ask.
Still searching for the perfect online roleplaying game? The lighter the better, I say. You can roll dice and move figurines on Roll20, but a conversational style of game is a lot easier and for my money more fun. That's one of the reasons I enjoyed running Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders, which quite honestly is a work of genius. If you've read the sagas you'll know how perfectly it captures the spirit of them, and right now it's Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG. Oh, and Gregor is giving half of the profits to the Red Cross while the pandemic continues.
Two other games with a similarly light touch when it comes to rules mechanics are, unsurprisingly, both Powered by the Apocalypse. First up I give you Tremulus, which spins Lovecraftian horror in an improv storytelling style. I have a conflicted relationship with HPL-based games in that, if you play them true to the spirit of the Cthulhu Mythos, the heroes can't win. Having said that, going mad, giving in to despair, and suffering inevitable defeat can also make for a cathartic experience.
Then there's Alas For The Awful Sea, which appears to be inspired by Melville, Conrad, Poe, and probably HPL again. You play a ship’s crew navigating the remote British Isles in the 19th century. There they face a world consumed with suspicion, sadness, and desperation. Hard to sum it up, but the designers Vee Hendro and Hayley Gordon say this:
"Struggles for power have deadly consequences; mysterious disappearances plague the region; and those who seem human may not all be so. Amidst all this, the sea sends forth strange messages. Will you be the one to listen?"
If you liked The Lighthouse, that one's definitely for you.
I've been making some discoveries about playing online. Simple rules work best, but that was pretty obvious from the git-go. I'm also finding games run better when they're audio only. We have one game on Discord with eight players, and one on Zoom with five players. There's much more cross-chat in the latter, because any appearance in any player's room of a child, spouse, pet, pizza or whatever risks distracting several of the players into launching off on a separate conversation where they talk over everyone else. Lacking video, the Discord game is much more focussed. Players stay in character more and wait for each other to speak, so it's less of a hubbub as well as encouraging a more vivid mental picture of the adventure. There's a good reason they call this improvised radio theatre with dice.
Pop back tomorrow when we'll be jumping on the magic carpet for a trip back to the land of the Arabian Nights. Not just an adventure, oh no. Open sesame indeed, this is a full campaign complete with detailed maps of 8th century Baghdad. And whatever you're playing in these difficult days, and whether it's with voices only or facetime too -- stay safe.
Back in the 20th century, the grimdark fantasy tradition had its beginnings in Michael Moorcock's Von Bek novels (The Warhound and the World's Pain, etc) which surely inspired Games Workshop's Warhammer RPG. In the early '90s, Jamie and I signed with GW to write a pseudo-Japanese supplement for Warhammer, which made sense given that the Sengoku period makes the Thirty Years' War look like a tussle between two drunks outside a kebab shop. But enough of me and Jamie...
Tetsubo had been commissioned by Paul Cockburn. Unfortunately he left GW the same week we delivered the manuscript. The new people in charge of roleplaying games there didn't have much enthusiasm for an Oriental take on the game -- and possibly not for roleplaying in general, as soon after that I think GW passed the Warhammer licence on elsewhere.
So that left Tetsubo in limbo -- or rather in Yomi -- until 2018, when Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios asked to adapt it as a supplement to his Warhammer heartbreaker, Zweihänder. The good news was the renewed spark of interest drove me to dig out the Tetsubo manuscript and scan it all, most of the book never having even been saved to disk and only existing in a faded dot-matrix-printed box of papers. The bad news: after a burst of activity it sank back into the land of mists, and after a year the contract lapsed.
Daniel Fox got back in touch last month to talk about renewing the contract, but his thinking had moved on. He wanted to bring in elements of 1960s chambara movies. That wasn't in itself a problem. Jamie and I are Kurosawa fans, even though we harbour no illusions about his movies being in any way authentically Japanese. But Daniel wanted to square the circle by meshing that with a real Sengoku vibe, and he had the problem that the book as written was more of a fit with the Bakumatsu -- because, of course, GW had wanted players to be able to bring their Old World characters in.
And then there was the question of who would tackle the redesign and conversion to the new system. Daniel proposed hiring Graeme Davis, who would have been ideal, but he was too busy to take it on. Now, at this point I should probably address the notion of "cultural appropriation", whose proponents (I think; I don't actually know any) might say the game could only be done properly if it had a Japanese designer. But would "a Japanese designer" have to mean somebody born and raised in Japan? Or could it be a Japanese citizen (wherever he or she was born) with a deep knowledge of medieval Japanese culture? Or simply somebody who happens to be ethnically Japanese -- Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, who went to school down the road from me in Surrey? You might have guessed by now that I don't subscribe to the woke obsession with ethnicity, an obsession which is supposedly progressive but in fact quite the opposite; we are all human, nobody owns culture or history, and there's no reason why the world's leading authority on, say, Classical Greece shouldn't be Maori.
But those are all just distractions. The bottom line is, a year on, Jamie and I could see that Tetsubo just wasn't going to happen. At least, it will only happen if we do it ourselves.
Currently we're mulling over whether this is worth doing as a Kickstarter. We'd need to rebuild it around a different game system, of course, and our first thought was Powered By The Apocalypse, which we enjoyed for its simplicity when we played our Sagas of the Icelanders campaign, but the appeal of Tetsubo will surely be to traditional roleplayers whereas PbtA would take it in a whole other narrativist direction. So not that.
One option is to use a variant of my Tirikelu RPG, but I'm not sure that would make best use of the skills and career paths in the Tetsubo book. I intend using Tirikelu for my Abraxas RPG (a good fit, hopefully, being science fantasy) and also Tirikelu isn't GURPS; we can't just tack it onto everything. Jamie suggested using a variant of my currently-in-development Jewelspider rules, on the principle that OSR players and Warhammer fans might have at least a nodding acquaintance with Dragon Warriors.
But then we had a brainwave. Paul Mason is an Anglo-Japanese academic who has lived in Japan for over twenty-five years. He's not only an authority on Japanese culture and history, he's also an editor, author and RPG designer with his own (as yet unpublished) game Outlaws, based on the stories of Liang Shan Po. What if we used the Outlaws system for Tetsubo? Not only would the gaming world get a taste of a brilliant and authentic Eastern-influenced RPG, but we'd get an extremely erudite Japanese scholar on board to consult on the final manuscript.
We asked Paul, he said yes, and that's the plan right now -- unless somebody throws an even better suggestion into the comments below.
Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress, which is used by a third of all websites worldwide - and a very good job it does too, as you can see from this one I made earlier. Recently Matt was talking to Sam Harris about how the future of work is going to be telecommuting. (Though strangely enough he seems to think that tele- prefix must be something to do with telephones... Neither a Greek scholar nor a fantasy/SF fan, obviously.)
You can listen to that discussion here. Matt should know what he's talking about -- his company has over a thousand employees worldwide but they don't bother with an office. The future has been a long time coming, though. When my last office job ended in the credit crunch, I resolved to go back to working mostly from home. The energy and time wasted in being squeezed onto trains for hours each day is just crazy. "The commute has had its day," I told business colleagues, little dreaming it would take eleven years and a global pan(ic)demic for companies to drag themselves out of the 20th century mindset.
It's never that simple, though, is it? Matt and Sam talk about the five phases of online working, which start off with companies trying to replicate the habits and work culture of bygone decades using modern tech, and then gradually evolves as they realize that distributed working is not a poor substitute for an office, it's a whole new and better way of doing things.
The podcast's subject is work not play, but there are lessons there for gaming too. We already talked about how asynchronous roleplaying could lead to richer stories than forcing everything into the format of a regular sit-down around the table with all the players. Here's another trend: the last decade or so has seen a movement to strip away the clunky mechanics of roleplaying's wargames origins and replace them with simpler rules that favour character-driven stories. Online play can only accelerate that. Tim Harford, who contributes the annual Legend Christmas special to this blog, has lately been prepping a new campaign for our group. The rules he's written are two pages long, and most of that is the magic system.
Even when the coronavirus lockdown ends (or the current lockdown, I should say) we ought to hold onto the lessons we're learning from online gaming. Don't get stuck in Phase I, like the characters in Forster's SF story "The Machine Stops". Instead embrace the growth that disruption brings, something that Tim Harford talked about eloquently in his book Messy.
Come back tomorrow when we'll be turning Japanese. Hence the video.
In this standalone and not wholly serious scenario (see Postscript) the characters are loyal vassals of the young King Allandar who is trying to unite the dozen provinces of Meropis. The provinces were previously held together under a yoke of tyranny, and now that the tyrants have been defeated after a long war of liberation there is a risk of fragmentation.
The characters are the King’s paladins. Pre-generated characters are provided (links below) using GURPS. Each paladin is famous for his or her archetypal talent and from these talents are derived their nicknames:
Tell the players a few of the legends that are told of the paladins. When Silvertongue once dropped his sword in the middle of a fight, he convinced his opponent to give him his. The Hunter once read a message brought by a pigeon before the bird had alighted. The Anvil once held up a bridge while the King’s army crossed. And so on. It is up to you how much these stories are exaggerations.
Tell the players the nicknames and let them decide among themselves who will play which paladin. Once they have their character sheets (you can get those as PDFs from the links above) they can name their character -- eg Merivus the Cunning. Whatever they like. Then randomly hand to all paladins but the Anvil one of the four magic swords that are twins to Auric, the Sword of Light, wielded by the King:
The Sword of Justice
None can avoid justice. Finds weak points; half usual penalty when targeting chinks in armour (p400). The Sword of Fire
Swift and deadly is this blade. You can make Whirlwind Attacks (p232) at -3 instead of -5. The Sword of Lightning
No weapon strikes more swiftly; you can make Rapid Strikes at -4 instead of -6 (p370). The Sword of Darkness
Strikes in a blur; your opponent is at an extra 50% penalty defending against Deceptive Attacks (p370).
HISTORY
After a three-year military campaign, King Allandar of Durdania has freed the dozen provinces of the Meropis Isles, driving out the Seven Necromancers of Nephid who have ruled (via their puppets, the Syndics of Tasuun) for a hundred years.
Nephid is a long reef of black granite crags in the sea to the west of Meropis. It is said at high tide to be entirely submerged. Nothing lives there apart from sea-birds and barnacles, but the few who have returned to tell of it speak of the lingering presence of the Necromancers who are said to lie submerged in the kelp-choked caves.
Durdania is an island province to the east of the main continent of Meropis. Its people are accomplished sailors and were (with Novaria) the most unruly of the Syndics’ subjects. It is ruled by the young King Allandar who is accompanied by his Paladins, childhood friends of heroic courage and ability. (The player-characters are the Paladins.)
Novaria is a rich province in the north-west of the Meropis empire. The Novarians are proud and see themselves as a distinct culture. Now that the Necromancers have been overthrown they don’t want anything to do with King Allandar’s plans to forge a united kingdom. But King Allandar needs Novaria’s wealth to rebuild the poorer parts of the empire which were always bled dry under the old regime and have suffered even more hardship during the war of liberation.
Novaria is ruled by Queen Aphra, who should really be a duchess but King Allandar has granted that concession in hopes they will stay in the empire. Queen Aphra has spent her life opposing the worst excesses of the Syndics, and now seems to regard their defeat as the opportunity to free her kingdom from the empire.
Tarascon is the lion deity of Novaria, a sort of Old Testament righteous type with a sprinkling of Jesus-like teaching as it might be understood by a High Tory of the 19th century. The Novariaians resent being told they are no longer allowed to preach their faith, as they regard all other religions as heathen.
Deep background (not generally known, even to Dr Kestrel):
Aphra Luttrell is the children’s great-aunt and came through into this world from Leofold Manor in 1870s Dorset when she was 14; she’s now in her late 70s. She imposed a version of her faith (a combination of Sunday school lessons and patriotism) complete with lion emblem.
The Luttrell children
Freddy 10 years
Mel (Amelia) 11 years
Justin 12 years
The Luttrell siblings are from Cheyne Walk in London and left Earth in January 1941, during the Blitz. They came through to this world using a fakir’s rope that their father brought back from India. Freddy played a tune on an Indian pipe and the rope stood up straight. They climbed it, then found themselves climbing down into this world. The rope went limp and Freddy had left the flute behind so there was no going back. They have a healing salve which they can offer to wounded characters. It’s standard WW2 first aid ointment, but superior to anything non-magical this world has to offer.
STRUCTURE OF THE ADVENTURE
This is a very highly structured adventure that is designed to be run in three hours. These are the story beats you’ll be aiming to hit:
Arrive at the palace. Get the mission briefing: stop the rebels destroying signal towers.
Go to Lord Garious. See pigs. Meet signal officer: told that the rebel leaders are children.
Go to woods. Meet the children: told that Vitrine the Glass Witch is alive and in the area, waiting for her casque (armour) which has been reforged in Mount Holovar. (The rebels disabled the signal towers partly because they think the empire is in league with her.)
Find Gall: told that Vitrine’s casque is being brought by the Bear of Drear via the Old Road that runs parallel to the main highway through the scrubland.
Fight Vitrine’s emissaries. Discover the armour is fake – they’ve been duped. Real casque being brought by a flock of ravens direct to Garious’s keep.
Back to Garious’s keep. Fight Vitrine herself.
Discover the real mastermind was Gall. Try and recapture him.
1. THE PALACE
The capital city of Meropis. As the characters approach the palace they see the signs of the long bitter siege: damaged buildings and people queuing for food.
Prisoners await judgement in the hastily-assembled courts. They hear grumbles that the soldiers of the Syndics have largely been allowed to integrate into the army (albeit on probation) and the only ones likely to be punished are the most senior officials.
The town crier is making some proclamations in the main square:
Proselytising is now outlawed. The King wants to prevent religious schisms breaking up the empire.
Users of magic must obtain a licence for any conjuration higher than the third decile of power.
These have no direct bearing on the adventure. They just serve to show the players how much remains to be done in winning the peace.
THE THRONE ROOM
Also damaged by the fighting. The High Throne is covered, the Eye of Nephid on the wall now effaced.
After a three-year war, the young and idealistic King Allandar of Durdania has freed the dozen provinces of Meropis, driving out the Necromancers of Nephid who have ruled (via their puppets, the Syndics of Tasuun) for a hundred years.
As they arrive, the King is explaining the reconciliation policy to his councillors. They would rather round up and punish all collaborators, but he says that the infrastructure of the realm is fragile and they cannot afford to replace every lord who made an accommodation with the Syndics’ rule.
The King’s advisor is Doctor Kestrel (Merlin type) who explains the background to their mission:
“To ward against any possibility of counterattack from beyond the Black River we have been erecting signal towers across the empire. However, the rebels of Novaria have been attacking the work gangs and burning the towers. Their short-sightedness threatens the continued stability of the whole realm.”
The King: “Now we must unify and rebuild. The empire is on a knife edge, weak and battered after years of war. Novaria was sheltered from the worst excesses of the Syndics’ rule, and did not suffer from the desperate fighting that ravaged the eastern states. We need the grain and resources that Novaria can provide to build a better life for all our subjects.”
2. THE KEEP IN THE MARCHES
New signal towers being attacked suggests the enemy camp is in the fringes of the Tinarath Woods, close to the border with Novaria.
The characters arrive at the keep of Lord Garious, warden of the marches, formerly a lukewarm sympathizer with the deposed Syndics of Tasuun, who were Nephid’s puppet rulers. Can the characters trust him?
Garious keeps a stable of fine pigs who snuff out truffles for him – the source of his wealth. The characters are treated to truffles at dinner.
The keep is by the town of Periton. They ride into stone stables. A reek of pigsties (this is where you can mention the truffle pigs) is swiftly masked by the many barrels of apples that line the upper halls; Periton Keep is also famed for its cider.
Lord Garious greets them in a drawing room with a crackling fire and gable windows looking out north across the moors.
They meet Captain Terfin, who was in charge of one of the sacked signal towers. He says that the rebel leaders were children.
(I based Periton town and castle on Dunster, especially the stables.)
3. THE WOODS
The Luttrell children are here with an airship (the Blighty). They expect to intercept Vitrine’s casque (suit of power armour) on the road.
On the ground: Freddy and Justin are with the troops. If attacked, they and their men (with a cry of “Scramble, chaps!”) ascend to the airship on individual balloons whose tethers they can cut quickly. To catch them you’d need to climb an adjacent tree really fast (as Surefoot could).
The airship Blighty nestles in a hollowed-out “crater” amid the treetops, so is not obvious till you’re up close.
Six soldiers rush forward to hold off the paladins while their comrades escape. A Tactics roll spots they are fighting defensively to buy time.
If they ascend to the airship, Mel Luttrell appears from the cabin and points an old WW1 Webley revolver at them. “If I pull this trigger, the stick will deal a sure death. But it contains only three such deaths, and I would sooner mete those deaths out to truly wicked foes who deserve them, so I’ll give you a chance to unhand my brother.”
THE CHILDREN
The children accuse the empire (they call it the Meropi Empire) of trying to assassinate Queen Aphra. They are highly prejudiced against the empire, regarding the new king as barely an improvement on the Syndics. Of course, their thinking is coloured by the world they come from, where radical visionary politicians are distrusted with good reason. As evidence of the assassination plot they present a dagger with the royal crest. “This was coated in poison!” (It was stolen from the throne room a few weeks ago by Lord Garious.)
Assuming the characters can calm things down and a truce is agreed, the Luttrells explain a little of how they came here and, more importantly, their mission:
“Vitrine the Glass Witch yet lives. She is the last of the Necromancers. It was thought she had fled, since her condition makes her wary of battle, but now we know that her casque – the impervious body armour that protects her, which was believed destroyed – has been reforged in the fires of Mount Holovar. According to our portents, the casque is to be delivered to her here in the Marches. And soon.”
If any characters are injured, remember that the children have a healing salve (see earlier).
GALL THE SPRITE
While they talk they have a chance of noticing a soft slithering or rustling (check Danger Sense too):
“The Glass Witch is said to be served by a woodland sprite!” gasps Mel.
Gall acts like a snivelling wretch and claims he serves Vitrine out of fear. “I’d like her dead too. One tap would shatter her – unless she gets her casque back. That’s what she calls her armour. It isn’t being brought on the highway, but on the Old Road that lies through the woods. But beware, for it is guarded by the Bear of Drear and Minister Midwinter.”
4. THE OLD ROAD
Snow starts to fall. This is the sorcery of Minister Midwinter, a demon that owes a service to Vitrine.
The characters need a tracking roll to find the Old Road (Gall will ingratiate himself by pointing them vaguely in the right direction) and it’s magical. If you step off the road, what is on it appears only as an intangible blur. Because of the snow, roll IQ to remain on it during a fight, or IQ+5 at other times.
The Bear of Drear is a huge mound of a monster that stinks of decay. Its fur is clumped and grimy with grave-mold, its skin slimy and pitted. It approaches accompanied by a thin blue figure and, behind them, a carriage like a hearse bearing an ornate mahogany casket.
Minister Midwinter, the aforementioned thin blue figure, stands to one side surrounded by a whirlwind of ice. To reach him: HT roll to endure biting cold, ST roll to push through the wind, then any hit will drive him off and you can see the Old Road clearly.
But when they have won, they find the carriage contains only an empty box.
High up in the sky they see a huge flock of ravens.
5. BACK TO PERITON
The ravens take their burden to the tower of the castle. As they arrive, Vitrine is already armouring up (you know, like this).
She first telekinetically lifts the cobbles from the main street (or courtyard) and these hang in the air, shooting in volleys at the characters: 2d6 each round, subtract armour and shield.
Then she starts a storm gathering, which after six rounds allows her to cast lightning bolts in addition to other actions.
Then she conjures a sickle (2d+2 cut) and whip (1d+5 cr, and HT or double damage) made of coruscating silver-green energy with which she fights (both weapons each round, skill 15).
She has 20-point armour but, in effect, a single Hit Point.
6. FINAL TWIST
After defeating Vitrine, they find a shoot and gall lodged inside her shattered glass skull. The true mastermind was Gall, who took control of the witch after the other Necromancers fell. But Gall has got away. In fact he’s burrowed underground and the only chance of finding him now is to use one of the truffle pigs (though a Perception roll beating a critical of 6 on 17 will at least confirm he can’t have got outside a perimeter).
7. EPILOGUE
Can they reconcile the King and the rebels?
Can they help the Luttrell children go home? (One way to get them home would be if Silvertongue plays a tune to animate the rope again.)
It's not expected they'll necessarily do this within the three-hour gaming session, but if not then they'll have something to think about afterwards.
POSTSCRIPT
I wrote the adventure as a birthday surprise for the 13-year-old son of a gaming buddy. The concept was simply: what if you experienced Narnia from the other side? Knowing I'd only have three hours to run it in, I abandoned my usual freeform approach and scripted it like a story -- not something I'd do often, but this time it worked. If Narnia isn't your bedknobs, here are some alternative sources for inspiration.
Ellery always figured out the answer, of course, and pretty often I did too; the fun of the game was standing or falling by my own reasoning. But those classic puzzle whodunits are a very artificial genre. Life isn’t like that, any more than most problems in dynamics can be solved as neatly as the applied maths questions I was doing for homework at the time.
Justin Alexander addresses that with his three-clue rule. In brief, it supplies the players with three different ways to figure out the next set-piece in the storyline. Certainly I think that if you’re going to have clues, you shouldn’t usually be getting the players to roll Spot Hidden or Search rolls to find them, because there are few ways in which simply not finding a clue leads to more interesting outcomes than finding a clue and drawing the wrong conclusion.
Indeed, it’s also the story if they signally fail to solve the mystery. In “Murder Your Darlings” my players got totally the wrong end of the stick. And so what if they did? Sometimes the dog meows in the night-time. Unsolved crimes are just as interesting as the ones that get neatly wrapped up. Miscarriages of justice are more dramatic than tidy endings.
